The Speed of Individual Face Categorization

How fast does the human visual system discriminate individual faces? To address this question, we used a continuous-stimulation paradigm in which event-related potentials (ERPs) to a face stimulus are recorded with respect to another face stimulus, rather than to a preceding blank-screen baseline epoch. Following the shift between two face stimuli, posterior sites showed an early negative ERP deflection that started at 130 ms and peaked at 160 ms, the latency of the N170, an ERP component associated with discriminating faces from objects. The ERP we recorded was larger in amplitude when the preceding stimulus was perceived as a different individual face rather than the same individual face, although face pairs were of equal physical distance in the two conditions. These findings provide direct evidence that individual face discrimination in humans can take place as early as 130 ms following stimulus onset, during the same time window as face detection.